El CLACSO Working Group Legacies and perspectives of Marxism adheres to the declaration prepared by the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Playa Ancha (Chile) in homage to Professor Sergio Vuskovic Rojo.

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What we have inherited will be valuable, not in itself, but through its constant re-creation in our hands. Far more important than what is received is who receives it.

Arturo Andrés Roig

Like Plato, Sergio Vuskovic knows that freedom, utopian, secret, an ever-possible horizon, is

He achieves this in the journey that the wise man committed to the Truth prepares.

Francisco Sazo, Preliminary words to Plato's Breviary

The passing of Sergio Vuskovic fills all of us who were his students and colleagues with sadness, all of us who had the honor and good fortune to share time with his exceptional character, his intelligence, commitment, and dedication. But Don Sergio's passing also allows us to pay tribute to a man of his stature, and we will do so by speaking of his human and intellectual legacy, by speaking of his work.

It was the year 1991 and a student was walking up the steps of the main building of the University of Playa Ancha. big manHis tall figure, with a slow gait, gray hair, and deep blue eyes that crinkled when he smiled, made this son of Croatian immigrants an affable person, always ready to listen and talk about philosophy, politics, and life.

Sergio Vuskovic, the teacher, the politician, the philosopher, three dimensions of an existence that was guided by critical and humanist thinking, a thought that has been written and published in books and articles and that forms part of the intellectual heritage of Our America.

Sergio Vuskovic belonged to a generation of intellectuals and communist activists of the 60s, and as such, his thought and action were marked by the idea of ​​social and political events, by the possibility of the advent of new manViewed from the distance of half a century that separates us from that political, cultural, and intellectual project, we cannot help but recognize in Don Sergio's work and political and academic actions a commitment to thinking about novelty and, through that thinking, opening spaces for it to occur. His texts are, to a large extent, a theoretical exercise through which he affirms the proto-Utopia of freedom and equality for human beings, the possibility of change, of emancipation from everything that threatens human dignity.

This imprint is present in his intellectual work of the 60s, through the publication of books and articles in which he strives, together with Osvaldo Fernández, for a heterodox, non-dogmatic reading of Marx, a reading that aims to "fertilize the work of Marx with new thoughts" (Vuskovic, The first 100 years of Capital) come from other continents such as Latin America.

Vuskovic's theoretical and political proposal of a Marxist humanism involved a theoretical operation on Marx's own texts in order to save critical thought from any form of totalitarianism. In this sense, the introduction of the utopian into critical theory is

The way in which Vuskovic seeks to demystify the Marxist perspective, precisely in the sense of opening up Marx's texts, distancing them from the orthodoxy in which the Soviet regime had confined them, and thereby rethinking the emancipation of man by man as the utopian horizon with which to break down certain oppressive totalities, whether of the left or the right. That is precisely the orientation of his writings. The first hundred years of Capital (1967) and Marxism is a dialogue with itself and with the world (1968); by that time, Vuskovic already understood that Marx's analyses were not closed truths, not dogmas, but rather tools for interpreting and guiding praxis. This is established by identifying the value of contingency in Vuskovic's reading of Marx's work. In this sense, the priority of praxis over theory is how Vuskovic utopianizes Marxism, by prioritizing contingency, the other in its empirical and concrete nature, so that this may guide theoretical practice.

Thus, the open and incomplete nature of Vuskovic's theoretical operations is what authorizes him to point out certain tasks imposed on Marxists of each era. For Vuskovic, Marxism can only be an open and dialogical theorizing, that is, a way of looking at reality that recognizes novelty and, from it, articulates concrete organizational proposals. In light of this orientation, Vuskovic understands theoretical work as an indispensable accompaniment to revolutionary praxis. The unity of theory and praxis—where praxis is always the guiding force in view of the project to come—is how the utopian function is actualized in Vuskovic's theorizing. For our philosopher, theory cannot be an exercise detached from praxis, that is, it cannot be an exercise disconnected from contingency, detached from the tensions and conflicts between concrete social actors. It is the way in which place and time guide theoretical decisions.

Vuskovic's return from exile and his appointment to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Playa Ancha in the 90s allowed him to re-evaluate the relationship between utopia and democracy. For Vuskovic, only a political regime capable of realizing a pluralistic experience of society could give life to the utopian, humanist, Marxist ideals. The democracy he envisioned for the future was one that rested on... ideological pluralismThat is, a regime that expands the spaces of freedom by recognizing other subjective positions, in the manner of a democracy utopian, as a pact on the political bond, but without hierarchies and, above all, without exclusion.

For Vuskovic, the democracy to come is one that rejects all dogmatism and all homogenization in the social sphere, an idea already present in his reflections of the 70s, when he stated: “When we say philosophy as concentrated politics, we see it integrated into the practical endeavor to transform the world. When we say politics as philosophy in action, we see it as the interpretation of the world being realized practically through its transformation” (Lenin, an anti-philosopher? 1971).

For Vuskovic, utopia and democracy are linked as a thought of hope, awaiting the transformation of humanity “(…) In hope lies the possibility of understanding human history in a new way, insofar as pathos of the transformation of the perennial emergence of novelty“(Vuskovic, S., “Utopia, Culture and University”, Notebooks of Latin American Thought, Faculty of Humanities, University of Playa Ancha, No. 3, 1995).

Thus, utopia is the pointing of an empty space, “the warning of what man still lacks to become truly human” (“Utopia, Culture and Society”), that which is lacking is configured through the utopias of equality, which is the way in which Vuskovic in the 90s refers to the Popular Unity project that was violently suspended in Chile.

The notion of utopia is a categorical construct made possible by the theoretical and political experience of the 60s, from which Vuskovic theorizes about temporality within the utopian function. Thus, our philosopher speaks of the past but with a sense of the future, pointing to an open route, a truncated path, trails interrupted, abandoned midway. It is a journey marked by exercises that can be resumed, paths that can be retraceable, in another context, by other men and women. Thus, the future is not only what lies ahead, in nothingness, but also what could have been achieved in the past. Here we see a subversion of temporality in utopia, in the sense of recognizing and valuing a theoretical and practical exercise that has already taken place, which can nevertheless guide the paths of the present with a view to the future—an exercise that is recognized in its otherness and transformative potential with respect to a present marked by homogenization and uncritical consensus. In this sense, utopia is not only a dream, something unrealized, but also a vision of a liberating experience that has been lived and that can continue to guide the future. Looking back at an open-ended past, figures emerge who are considered a legacy—Marx and Allende—and, from their perspective, Vuskovic examines the present in order to critique it.

The critique of the neoliberal present in 90s Chile is framed as a critique of the protected and restricted democracy of Chile's transition, a democracy where the "vice of unanimity" prevails. This is Vuskovic's term for the politics of consensus that characterized the Chilean transition, where only one voice is authorized in public debate—the one whose horizon is neoliberal pragmatism. In this context, Vuskovic reconsiders the relationship between utopia and democracy, the need to think about democracy from a utopian perspective, since he recognizes that utopia fulfills a social function: overcoming different forms of alienation through the mediation of politics. This is because alienation is overcome through theoretical and practical exercises, and these exercises depend on guiding ideas, on inspiring orientations that touch upon ethics; it is here that utopia emerges. In this relationship between utopia and politics, the figure of the ghost appears, that which was suspended, aborted, but which, as such, inspires a new way of thinking about the other. What can the utopian experiences of the past tell us about Latin America today, Vuskovic asks in a series of texts published between 1993 and 1998.

From this perspective, our philosopher speaks of the concrete utopia to refer to socially developed projects that, howeverThese ideas have not been realized; as such, they are ideas that can be taken up and reworked to continue illuminating the path. Thus, utopia is understood as the hope that fertilizes politics, which is the space of the concrete, of the possible. The possible is conceived from the unrealized; this is what gives fertility to the utopian function, as that which opens reality so that it can be thought not from the established order, but from the expectation of the other.

Vuskovic, the utopian thinker, the philosopher of hope, the teacher attentive to his students' questions, the politician committed to transformations that expand the dignity of all.

Dear teacher, you sowed seeds here at UPLA, you opened a path for philosophy, for the humanities, a path that, we are certain, has transcended the walls of this House and also reaches the high schools of Chile, because there are many teachers trained by you who have valued and incorporated the critical, utopian and Latin American perspective to carry out their educational work

Thank you so much for everything you have bequeathed to us.

Faculty of Humanities of the University of Playa Ancha (Chile)

19 2021 August
CLACSO Working Group
Legacies and perspectives of Marxism

This statement expresses the position of the Working Group Legacies and perspectives of Marxism and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.